The Auldest Tung
People, Predicaments, Places and Timing
So far, even with a stage set, we have talked only about “people” in a general sense but now more direct questions have to be asked, specifically, if Danes were not in Southern Jutland in 550 AD, then who was, to which has to be added, where, and, if Frisia was in trouble, what happened? And the answers to all three are that nobody knows, at least not precisely but there are hints.
In the middle of the first century AD Pliny the Elder, admittedly somewhat remotely, quite an understatement, since he was born in Northern Italy and died near Pompeii, described five Germanic groupings, perhaps more linguistic than tribal, just on and outwith the then Roman Empire’s northern borders, of which one, the Ingaevones, lived at the time in Jutland and the area immediately to its south. Furthermore he stated these same Ingaevones consisted of the Teutones, the most northerly, next the Cimbri and southernmost the Chauci, the last living between the Elbe and the Ems and said to be related to or including Frisians immediately to their south and east and Saxons and Angles to their north. However, his information in part may have been just a little out-of-date. Two centuries or so earlier Cimbri, although not necessarily all, with some Teutons, again not necessarily all, and others are said to have left Jutland and in west-central Europe taken part in the Cimbric Wars, which in 101 BC had ended in defeat by the Romans of the tribe’s men and, rather than enslavement, the mass suicide of its women and children.
So when a generation later Tacitus, friend of not of Pliny the Elder but Pliny the Younger, and probably born in Narbonne in South-West France so admittedly almost equally distant, described as living in “remoter” areas roughly the same as those of the elder Pliny, the following, Reudigni, i.e. Reudingi, Aviones, Anglii, Eudoses and Nuithones, with the last two possibly the same and no indication that the list was north to south or the inverse, he might have been more up-to-date. That was not least because, whilst all were still north of and outwith the Roman Empire it itself had been moved northwards and there were no doubt Germanic relationships across the border, by then just north of the Rhine, via assimilated tribes within the Empire with the latter able to provide the writer a certain amount of more precise, contemporaneous knowledge of what lay beyond. Thus residue Teutons might have morphed into Nuithones and/or Eudoses, Anglii, i.e. Angles, might have been related to or have been the remnants of the Cimbri or simply a smaller tribe that had filled their space, Saxons, Saxones, were perhaps Aviones by another name, and to the south and west Frisii, as they were called by the Romans and who lived more or less as they still do today in the soggy land on mainland Europe’s western rim in Holland and Germany, might have more or less maintained their range. Yet it is all supposition, really only showing that whilst names come and go, morph, and change they also over time can remain remarkably and recognisably essentially the same. Whilst Nuithones, Eudoses and Teutons, “Nuites”, “Eud/tes”, “Teutes” have become the more generic Jutes, and Aviones perhaps “Axiones”, Saxones and Saxons, Anglii more simply became Angles and Frisii Frisians.
And just as this process of changing yet remaining applies to peoples so it does to places. Maps, drawn up admittedly in the late rather than the early Middle Ages, have to the immediate south of the Dannewerke Fraeslaet and Kamp, with Stapel or Stapelholm, Stapel-Island, to its west, Araeld to its immediate north, Ugloe and Mitte Angeln beyond that and the North and South Go-s to its north-west, these last two areas now forming part of North Friesland. Of those names, all of which must by definition have had their origins further back still in Jutland’s history, perhaps as far back as in the three hundred year before 700 AD, only Stapel there remains in current use. However, if not all then several of them appear to have modern echoes pointedly not on the Continent but throughout not just England but in Scotland as far north as the Forth-Clyde valleys and in Eastern Scotland possibly even to Caithness and arguably to Orkney.
But let us take a step back for a moment; one to advance two; to about 350 AD, to climate cooling for all and the movement of Germanic peoples, not Cimbri, since they were seemingly already long gone, but rather individually Danes, Jutes, Angles and Saxons and Frisians and the predicaments, in which each found itself. All were on the stir. That we know. But it was not necessarily in the same way, the land-trek of the Danes being the obvious exception. Nor beyond climate change was it, it seems, even for the others for quite the same reason or reasons. More often than not In their regard the single reason for movement is suggested to have been if not permanent sea-level rises, since they would normally be associated with rising not falling temperatures, then disturbance of weather patterns resulting in storm surges. However, in one area there was perhaps another factor, that would both have made the impact of the surges greater in terms of area but also chronologically accelerated it. The reason was land subsidence and the area was Old Frisia.
In this period, outwith more-elevated Flanders, so in North Germany and the Netherlands in particular, it is in historical records said through inundation to have become largely uninhabitable. The sea moved perhaps fifteen miles or twenty-five kilometres inland. Myriad natural islands and the “terps”, the artificial islands previously built by the marshland dwellers for their villages, would have simply disappeared, overwhelmed, even with a driven sea rise of a metre and certainly with two metres with their inhabitants at worst drowned or at best displaced, forced to move, driven out by simple water. Moreover, whilst in South Jutland it is difficult to see over the longer term that inundation could have been any less devastating and Old Frisia had something that South Jutland did not, a theoretically almost infinite, eastern hinterland, where there was scope, i.e. space, for retreat, the speed of events in the latter could have required a response between one and two and even three or four generations earlier, one that was more hurried than in the former and which proved irreversible.
Frisia would only re-emerge some two hundred years later as warming and therefore calming seems to have taken place. But it would not be the same. In the meantime Flanders moved on and, whilst the remainder of Old Frisia, now plus a part of South Jutland north of the Elbe, was gradually repopulated and once more by Germanic people it was not necessarily by the same ones. There were, if you like, the more southern Old Frisia before the inundation and a New Frisia, the inundated Old Frisians lands plus to the north those in South Jutland. There were also Old Frisians and now New Frisians, a mixture of some Old Frisians plus Saxons and others, the peoples, and Old Frisian, now seemingly lost, and New Frisian, their equally distinctive languages.
However, we return to the inundation period. Whilst Old Frisia had its extensive hinterland, albeit one already inhabited by others, narrow, south-West Jutland offers and offered no such option. Its people, whoever they were tribally, would, in looking for sanctuary on higher ground, have had little choice but to move into an already populated strip of land including Araeld and Ugloe, that would have been between just 8-10 and 15 miles wide and perhaps 40 miles long, lying to the west of perhaps ancient Southern Anglia including modern Mitte Angeln itself, extending from the Tjerpsted/Emmerlev peninsula just north of the present German-Danish border south to where Schleswig, the state not the town, morphes into Holstein and including at its base the Jutland Traps. Moreover, this same situation with the same metre or perhaps two sea-level rise would have been replicated both to the north and south of this strip albeit, again because of space, to a somewhat lesser extent. Just to the north of Hamburg the hinterland would have been reduced but have still been about fifty miles west-east but with the Elbe estuary pushing thirty miles further inland and being ten miles rather than two wide. And it would have been much the same between Esbjerg and Kolding 150 miles up the peninsula.
Thus for populations no matter where there was compression. No region could avoid it, and more often than not it came from two, sometimes three directions at once. To the south of the enlarged Elbe, over the also enlarged Weser and Ems round the flooded Holland basin to the equally enlarged Rhine not only was the North Sea pushing inwards there was also movement of other and powerful Germanic tribes south- and westward, notably the Franks, the proto-type French, from the 4th Century onwards into the area east of Old Frisia, fact into Brabant. Then to the north the widening Elbe itself was giving its inhabitants the unwanted choice of moving east, from where there was not just Germanic but also Slav pressure beyond that, or the Jutland Traps entered from the south and borne down upon from the north. And for peoples from the north itself, from the upper Jutland Peninsula and, indeed, perhaps the diminished Danish islands to the east, there again seems to have been little choice. Those arriving, whether by land or sea and land, could try either to wait at the Schleswig-Ellingstedt bottle-neck, milling with those forced into the same area from the marshes to the immediate west, and all to pass through into Wohlde and Berge and the Traps beyond, or turn in the only direction remaining, i.e. eastwards but with the restriction of the Baltic Sea just twenty-five miles away with nothing but Angeln and Angles in between. Put more bluntly, whilst the Old Frisians, who might have headed inland would have been forced to turn around, but only eventually, and Saxons north of the Elbe had three choices, firstly be forced southwards across the river putting pressure on the cousins on the other side and more still on what remained of Old Frisians beyond, secondly move south-east and put more pressure on other cousins or finally in extremis northwards into the Traps, the marsh people of Southern Jutland would have been forced into Ugloe and the Jutes, Tutes and other assorted people from north and east would either have had to sit on the Dannewerke and despair or push east into the Baltic to drown there instead.
It seems therefore at this point that conventional analysis of the reason why the non-Saxon portion of Anglo-Saxons first came to Britain, weather, seems to be intuitively correct. But there is a problem, one that even points to the historians who formulated it having never actually visited Angeln itself. It, or rather its present remnant and perhaps previous heartland, is not at all a waterlogged wasteland but hilly and even today well-wooded, dotted with prosperous-looking small towns and villages. In fact it is not unlike much of inland Sussex, Kent and Surrey. It is a place that now might be labelled “desirable”. Moreover, even with cooling weather and perhaps increasing storms and rain, life must have been hard, but bearable, suggesting that emigration from it had a cause other than the directly climatic one of inundation. And what we know and/or can infer perhaps now provides us with just such an alternative cause, which in result, population movement, might look much the same but in reality was absolutely distinct. It was overcrowding and, probably initially from the marshes to the west but in time from the north, Jutes, and possibly even the east too, displaced island people, resulting in resource strain and perhaps conflict.
Thus we have in coastal, north-west Europe initially one thing happening in one area and subsequently in a second two things happening simultaneously. In large parts of Old Frisia the people rapidly found themselves essentially left with nothing, whilst in Southern Jutland one group of similar people then would face the same, if not geographically more constrained, predicament, whilst another increasingly still had something, dry, productive land, but perhaps not enough for its own population and certainly not enough both it and incomers. Moreover, overcrowding looks also to have been a major factor in the other half of the apparently Anglo-Saxon duopoly, Saxonia, making its moves to and into Britain. Albeit slightly later because pressure took longer to build, they were possibly two-phased and thus offering an explanation of the existences of the very distinct Essex and Wessex. The first phase were those Saxons from north of the Elbe, forced further north and east still and towards the Trap. Their move was from a situation of extremis. The other phase was from south of the Elbe, in the face of possibly lesser pressures, but with them nevertheless coming from both east and west, and perhaps with the encouragement of what they were hearing on the Germanic grapevine. In other words it is completely understandable at least for some of their number that, as cooling bit still further, stories gleaned from their pioneering cousins of opportunities on the other side of the North Sea became well-nigh irresistible.
Certainly such a scenario would fit in well not only with the when but also what seems after 400 AD to have happened to and in Britain, rather than what was then later reported by those with different and vested interests, not least in the Saxon Chronicles. It would indicate that for at least two, three, perhaps even five generations non-Saxons were probably the only newly immigrant Germanic speakers in situ in Britain, south and north. Moreover, those same non-Saxons had in England by the arrival of what seem to be thought of as “real” Saxons successfully extended their sphere of influence from easternmost Kent along the south side of the Thames Estuary, further upstream onto both banks of the river itself almost already encircling still British London and beyond, perhaps as far as Oxford, and possibly as much as half way along Britain’s southern shore. Indeed place-name analysis seems to indicate that they had in stages used the Thames itself and rivers that flow from the north into it, the Lea and the Stort, the Roding and the Rom, and those from the south, the Medway and the Dart, and then the sea and the South Coast rivers Rother, Cuckmere, Ouse and Arun to to penetrate inland up the Thames Valley, into northern Kent and still in Kent to have settled much of the coastal strip from Eastern Hampshire to its south-western border.
Furthermore the Germanic newcomers would do it not as a mass movement but largely but not entirely in tribal or sub-tribal groupings. Whilst Kent as a whole is claimed by some to have been Jutish, but seems only demonstrably so in part, the first Thanet settlement and immediately beyond more likely being, for reasons to be explained, a mix, Frisian-Angle-Other, Fringlic, majority Jutes are also said in the South to have settled the Isle of Wight, the edge of the mainland immediately to its north on the Solent, the Hastings area and subsequently in the North, viz. the borders of South and West Yorkshire. Then at various places there are what look to be specifically Frisian implantations in Sussex, Suffolk and Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, and some possibly also from Stapel and Ugloe. In addition a landing not unopposed but specifically of Angles, under the leadership of one Aella, with his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing and Gissa, is said to have taken in 477 AD at Cymenshore, probably near Keynor on the mainland behind the then island that is now Selsey Bill. Then, with in 485 AD a further British force defeated, such was their expansion not westward but eastward that by 492 AD, with reinforcements just brought in by Ella himself from the homeland, island Pevensey seems to have been taken, the coastal land between it and Selsey controlled and Angle and Fringlic faced each other, if somewhat distantly, over what were effectively the broad inlet of the River Rother and others, what we call Romney Marsh. It almost certainly explains the several Lancings, named ostensibly after Wlencing and then on an inlet of the River Adur that penetrated nine miles inland. And it might also explain why when south-coast Saxons did finally arrive, just two or three years later and perhaps encouraged by those reports of recent events on the Germanic tom-tom, their first settlements, said to have been in the until then still British-held Meon Valley and were probably also on the Hamble were crucially just outwith, beyond, the territory of their established, Germanic predecessors.
Now it has to be said at this juncture it is clear that from this distance in time the scenario as just outlined could be said to be supposition. However, counting back back in distance and years at the same rate as has already been assumed for the Danes’ departure from mid-Sweden and their arrival in Denmark of two kilometres a year proves interesting, if possibly again entirely coincidental. In Kent overland avoiding Canterbury, from Thanet to Ashford is forty kilometres, twenty-five miles or twenty or so years, suggesting an on-average arrival of settlement there of sometime after 470 AD. Then from Ashford to, after a first on Thanet, a second Reading Street on the Rother facing west it is a further 22 years, so seemingly 492 AD and right on the button. Similarly in north Kent from Thanet to Faversham it is fifteen years so 464 AD, to the Medway fourteen more or 478 AD and from there to Dartford eleven or forty in total and 489 AD. In fact events meant that the pace in North Kent at least was actually both faster, suggesting sea rather than land transport, and slower not just to begin with but also later on, suggesting known resistance. But more of that later. And this is whilst in what is present-day Sussex it is fifty-six miles from Selsey Bill to Pevensey, meaning that the pre-Saxon, supposedly Anglian taking-of-control but not necessarily overrunning of that piece of the coast might have been expected to take 44 years but actually seems to have been completed, if not unhindered, in half the time, again suggesting expansion, indeed incursion, at least in part by sea rather than land, something reinforced by place-name analysis.
Thus by 500 AD it seems reasonable to assume that the walls of London would have been Germanically reached if not yet breached (that may only have finally been in 586 AD) as would have been the point at which Surrey, Sussex and Kent meet in the High Weald. In addition Kent would have been consolidated as would the Sussex coast below the South Downs from Chichester eastwards, perhaps eastern Hampshire and much of the Thames valley, certainly the Isle of Wight, the east Hampshire shore and most recently the upper Meon Valley to the river’s source but with one question left hanging. If the time taken to obtain by force the territory that at the beginning of the 7th Century was Germanically-held and presumably to settle the same was not less than fifty years and perhaps seventy-five at the most, how large had been that force or rather those forces?